What is the use of a recipe? A recipe is a teaching tool, a guide, a point of departure. Follow it exactly the first time you make the dish. As you make it again and again, you will change it, massage it to fit your own taste and aesthetic. Eventually it will become your own personal recipe - Jacques Pepin

Monday, September 20, 2010

Web of Lies by Jennifer Estep

So, our favorite assassin is retired now. After the death of her surrogate father and handler, Fletcher Lane, she inherited a great deal of his money, as well as his home, and the restaurant he operated, the Pork Pit, so in deference to his wishes and because she really doesn't have to, Gin Blanco is trying to go straight.

Unfortunately, the thugs around town have other ideas. When the son of a local bigshot lawyer tied to the vicious fire elemental Mab Monroe decides to get unruly in her restaurant, she has to put him down, hard, after he threatens to kill her and a couple of her customers. When she presses charges for attempted robbery, his father decides to make her life miserable.

To make it even harder, a damsel in distress (isn't it usually a guy hero supposed to rescue those sorts?) shows up on Gin's doorstep and is the target of a professional assassin, who shoots up the windows in the Pork Pit. Kind of a rough week for the bbq business. Gin decides to investigate, to find out why the girl is under attack, and things get even rougher when she finds out that a dwarf coal mining magnate who has ties to Mab Monroe, also, is after the girl's grandfather's land. When the grandfather in question turns out to be an old friend of Fletcher's, the die is cast, and Gin has to bring back all her old skills, and acquire a few more, to take care of the bad guys and their brute squads.

More complications come from her fire and ice relationship with Donovan Caine, and we get to know some of her allies, the dwarf Deveraux sisters, a little bit better, as well as experiencing with Gin a few flashbacks to when she got involved with Fletcher, and became the assassin's apprentice. Good stuff, I need to pick up Venom soon.

About Me

A middle-aged fellow from the Northwest, who has at various times been employed as a mechanic, a chef, a technical writer, and an IT geek. I'm a fully addicted reader, mostly science fiction and fantasy, but will read whatever is available, when the monkey is on my back. I love travel, good food and riding twisty roads on my BMW.

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